Max Hayslette

Born in Rupert, West Virginia in 1929, Max Hayslette is a 1951 graduate of the American Academy of Art in Chicago and also in the fall of that year studied briefly with Egon Weiner and Alexander Archipenko at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mr. Hayslette says this brief period changed the way he viewed art and his own perception of how he would eventually fit into a life of design and painting. This is when and where he began to appreciate the modernist way of looking at life and painting. At the end of 1951 Mr. Hayslette was granted an internship with Kenneth Olson, one of the original Chicago Seven, composed of leading artists and designers. This was a period when remnants of the Bauhaus movement listed Chicago as its home. Mr. Hayslette remained on the Olson staff for 10 years.

In early 1962 Hayslette relocated to Seattle, WA and was a principle at Berg, Hayslette, Dupar design firm. In 1973 Hayslette founded Olympus Graphics, Inc. and Olympus Atelier on Bainbridge Island, WA. He now lives and works on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington State.

“Memory colored by imagination is the root from which my images grow” - Max Hayslette

Mr. Hayslette lists Archipenko and Man Ray as two artists he greatly admires and from whom he has learned much. The artist has studied great works of Asian masters in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Kyoto. He has traveled Europe studying and painting and often paints in southern France and northern Italy as well as the Greek Islands and western Turkey. The artist has been greatly influenced by these travels.